Our team won the Suceava Hard & Soft International Contest 2011!
In this article I would like to briefly present the idea and the concept of the whole project as well as the Android interface which I built for this contest (this was my job).
The project focuses on harvesting energy from the environment through as many ways as possible, and efficiently using the harvested energy in an off-grid building, adapting the consumption to the currently available energy levels. The main energy sources to be used for harvesting are:
Through its web and Android interfaces, the project offers functionalities such as analysing the harvesting efficiency, energy consumption throughout the building, setting up profiles and managing consumers individually. The system can switch AC sockets on or off and can turn light dimmers down or up in order to adjust consumption to the current energy levels in the system.
The system has a hierarchical architecture, with a System Server as a central node, which acts as a gateway between the user interfaces and the harvesters and consumers in the system. The System Server gathers data from the harvesters and from wireless smart energy meters that are installed on standard AC sockets and light dimmers. The system also publishes data to the user through the use of a web interface and mobile devices. The system is universal in a sense that any electrical consumer that needs to be plugged in a standard AC socket or can be connected through a light dimmer can be part of this system.
Various types of communication and protocols are used: the server uses SPI to communicate with the SD card which holds the data, connects through wireless with the nodes and using Ethernet with a router, which sits on the edge of the system, to wait for both wired and wireless internet connections with user computers or mobile devices.
Mobile devices are increasingly popular in all segments of society, which makes them an ideal interface device for our system. With the ability to connect securely to remote access points and to display high resolution, rich color graphs, they are quite often preferred by industrial and business solution providers as well.
The Android interface in our project need to be able to both display rich information such as graphs and tables and to take in user action through forms.
The user interface maps the main scenarios and is divided into four main sections:
All charts are plotted using AChartEngine, a free software library for Android applications.
Graphs are available for both harvesters and consumers. Graphs can display individual devices or all of them:
For each of the consumers, the user can set a state, depending on its type. For consumers that plug into sockets, the user can switch it on or off. For lights, the user can set a level. The Eneco system can also manage automatically all consumers according to the profile that the user set.
The mobile device connects to the router through wireless, using an username and password. The system server is connected to the router through Ethernet. After both connections were made succesfully, the two devices being in the same network, the data is acquired in a simple, previously agreed protocol: on a timebase of 5 seconds, the mobile device queries for data and stores it locally in order to compose the necessary graphs. In order to do this, a service is running in the background of the Android device, which polls the server on a timebase of 5 seconds, using the HTTP protocol.
The full project documentation can be found here:
http://elf.cs.pub.ro/pm/wikihs2011/doku.php
Politehnica University of Bucharest
Members: Vlad-Ştefan PETRE, Andrei-Alexandru SCUREI, Matei TENE, Adrian BOSTAN
Adviser: Nicoale ŢĂPUŞ, Coach: Dan-Ştefan TUDOSE, Alexandru OLTEANU
Vlad Petre
vlad[at]vladpetre[dot]com
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